How to Cook Well with Rory O'Connell s01e01 Episode Script

I've been doing both for 30 years.
To cook well, it helps if you love and value food, as that's where it all starts.
My approach to cooking is simple and not new.
Use the best ingredients you can, get organised, follow the recipe, that way you'll be sure to get wonderful results.
A salad of leaf greens is a keystone of my cooking and eating.
On its own, or as an accompaniment to another dish, it's always present at the lunch or dinner table.
There are hundreds if not thousands of variations on the leaf salad theme, and the combination of ingredients in this case, hard boiled eggs, chorizo, harissa and mayonnaise when combined with the fresh leaves, make a really amazing dish.
The first thing I'll do for the salad is to make the harissa, which is a really brilliant store cupboard item.
It's a north African spice-filled, quite hot condiment.
We start with some red chillies.
We're going to roast them.
We want to roast them until the skin blisters.
On a tray, no oil, no salt and pepper, and just straight into the oven to roast.
When they come out of the oven, while they're still hot, straight into a bowl.
Cover the bowl tightly with cling film.
A head of steam builds up in here and the steam helps to lift off the skin, so it makes it easier to peel them.
I have as you can see, allowed these to cool down completely.
And then they're relatively easy to peel.
It depends on the particular chilli, but you just keep pulling the skin down like that, and it just pops out.
And then I just cut off the little stalk off the top, and then slit them open.
If you want this to be bombastically hot, leave the seeds in.
Interestingly by the way, with chillies, the seeds aren't really the bit that's the hottest, the bit of the chilli that's the hottest are these threads here that the seeds are attached to.
That's really where the intense heat is, but because the seeds are in such close proximity to that thread, that's why they have the reputation of being the hottest.
Pop these into a food processor.
I have the rest of my ingredients here.
Some crushed garlic.
Quite a bit of crushed garlic, that's 8 cloves.
But the chillies have enough flavour to temper it.
Then some spices.
The sweet flavour of ground roasted cumin, and ground and roasted coriander.
It's a really, lovely palate of flavours.
Some tomato paste or puree to add sweetness.
The other other herb I'll add is a little freshly chopped coriander.
Just for freshness.
I don't need to chop this too finely, because the machine will do some of the work for me.
A pinch of salt.
Set your blender at a low speed and drizzle in a generous measure of olive oil.
You want to add enough to bind your ingredients but not so much that they're swimming in oil.
That's looking good now.
Careful now, this is fairly fiery stuff! Holy moly! It's absolutely delicious.
It's quite spicy, I may start to cry.
I'll put a tiny pinch of sugar, just for that final lift.
It's delicious.
I'm suddenly in a much hotter part of the world.
That looks perfect.
That's the consistency I was trying to achieve that soft, not quite a flowing consistency, but on the other hand, you can see the way that will spread.
I'm delighted with that.
Jam-packed full of flavour.
I'll put that into a bowl.
So it doesn't make a huge quantity, but it's so intense in flavour that you only ever really use very little of this.
The next thing I need to do is get my eggs on cooking.
Add a good pinch salt to the boiling water, this actually seasons the egg while it cooks, because the eggshell is porous.
I want hard boiled eggs so I'm going to cook them for 10 minutes.
The other thing I can do is get my chorizo on cooking.
Just sliced chorizo and a bit of olive oil.
Really what I'm trying to do here is draw flavour out of the chorizo and into the the oil.
These will cook just for 3 or 4 minutes.
I'm not going to serve them hot particularly on the salad, you could if you wanted to, but it's really the spicy flavour of the oil that I'm after and the colour of the oil and the slightly different texture I've given to the chorizo.
First separate your eggs, and I cannot emphasis enough how important it is to have clean bowls, and to avoid getting even small amounts of yolk in with the whites.
You don't need the whites for the mayonnaise, but keep them for meringues, they freeze perfectly.
Add a pinch of salt to the yolks and a generous grind of black pepper.
A small teaspoon of mustard isn't essential, but I think it rounds off the flavour.
Add two teaspoons of white wine vinegar and whisk all of these ingredients together.
So far, so straight forward.
The next stage is straight forward too, but it's the part of the technique that most people think is difficult.
Honestly, it isn't.
Drizzle the olive oil on slowly in a steady dribble, rather than pouring it in too quickly.
It requires a bit of co-ordination and patience, but really it's just five minutes, and in that time you're creating one of the world's really great sauces.
It bears no resemblance to anything you'll buy in a jar.
Prove this to yourself by tasting it and pat yourself on the back for having disproved the myth that mayonnaise is difficult to make.
With my mayonnaise ready I can now assemble my salad.
Most salads, certainly savoury salads, you'll need lots of lovely leaves.
This will form the balance for the dish.
Grab the hard boiled eggs.
How beautiful are those? I'll just pop them in fairly randomly.
A little blob of mayonnaise first.
Now for the harissa.
This is spicy stuff, so go easy here.
Your family or friends, can always ask for a bit more, there's always going to be one chilli fiend at any table.
But let's not have the entire group rendered speechless.
This doesn't really start to look nice until you put the very last thing, you're looking at it at this stage thinking, I'm not so sure about that.
But when you put on the chorizo and the final little drizzle of our oil.
See the way the oil has now taken on a lovely sort of saffron, rust colour? So the final little addition are a few little coriander leaves.
And that's it, straight to the table with that.
Little bit of brown soda bread, butter to go with, or some new boiled potatoes will be fantastic.
Lunch, supper.
Easy, lovely, nutritious, delicious food.
Perfectly grilled steak with a mustard and herb butter, a lamp chop with a roast garlic mayonnaise, another use for our home made mayonnaise.
A golden fillet of fish with lemon and herb salsa.
A juicy hamburger with roast mushrooms.
What all of these have in common is the technique of pan grilling or pan frying.
The main differences in the results from the two cooking pans, are appearance and texture.
The grill pan with it's raised edges will give richly coloured lines on the ingredient being cooked.
So the resulting colour tends to be two tone, and a slightly crispier finish.
Whereas the frying pan gives a more even and single colour result, with not as much texture.
The grill pan also produces a slightly deeper flavour.
The following dish demonstrates this crucial technique.
I'm going to start with the apple and plum sauce which we're going to serve with our burgers and our chops.
Peel your apple, cut it into quarters and then core it.
It's interesting when you're cooking, with a cooking apple, a bitter cooking apple like a Bramley, that the smaller you cut the apple, the longer it takes to cook.
I know that sounds completely ridiculous and a complete contradiction, but it's a fact.
So cutting up the apples like that, chunky sized pieces.
And then the plums, I'm just going to quarter.
So run your knife around them like that, and then run my knife around again in the opposite direction, then usually they're reasonably good humoured like that.
And they break up.
The apples and the plums.
I'm putting in two table spoons of sugar in there.
And then a little water.
And the purpose of the water is just to stop the sauce from burning.
You look into the saucepan and see virtually no water in the bottom of the pan.
We're going to put that on a low heat.
And the apples and plums will just break down to a foam.
Now our pork.
This is beautiful, Irish Quality Assured pork, a nice amount of pork fat.
I'm going to cut off the rind or the skin.
Just cut along the rind.
Then what I like to do is cut that rind into long, thin strips.
Three or four from each pork chop, depending.
They're going on to my pan.
They'll throw out some of the fat, and that will be a vehicle for cooking the pork in.
We'll keep a little eye on those.
They're cooking away, and after the break I'll show you how to make some delicious pork burgers.
I'm also going to prepare a terrific turnip puree.
Believe me, it's much better than it sounds.
Then we'll round everything off with some shortbread biscuits and a raspberry fool.
Before the break we left the apples and plums on a gentle simmer.
We trimmed the pork chops and we put some crackling on to crisp up.
So our various things stew and crackle, let's get on with our pork burgers.
I've got beautiful pork mince here.
And you'll notice, like any mince should be, it's flecked with little bits of fat.
So you're going to get a lovely juicy texture.
To get a good burger of any description you need a small amount of fat.
So what I'm going to add to this are some chopped chillies.
I've got some lovely pistachio nuts.
Which are really delicious with the pork, and they give a lovely, crunchy texture.
I've got some crushed garlic.
Pork loves garlic.
And the spice I'm going to use is fennel seeds.
With the fennel seeds, which is a classic flavour combination with pork, I want to just roast them a little, before I add them into the mixture.
You associate fennel seeds with Mediterranean cooking, Indian cooking, Italian cooking.
It's used in all of the great cuisines all over the world.
And one of the reasons for that is that it grows everywhere.
Into my pestle and mortar.
You could use a spice grinder, but this is as convenient as anything.
That's looking lovely, see it doesn't take so long.
I've got some of the slightly coarser fennel seed as well as some completely ground to a powder.
The chunky bits of fennel will be delicious when they're cooked in the burger.
So I'm going to pop the fennel into the bowl, and then we are ready to mix.
A nice pinch of salt.
Pepper.
And a little fresh coriander, just to freshen everything up, so all these flavours love each other.
The colours starting to appear in the bowl are lovely.
A good mix.
I'm not going to use any egg to bind this, because the fat in the pork, will help to bind everything together.
What I need to do before I form my burgers, is fry off a tiny a little bit of the mixture, to make sure the seasoning is perfect.
So make the tiniest little burger, a few crumbs.
I'm going to fry that for a couple of minutes to check whether it needs more seasoning.
Let me see.
Needs salt.
That's why it's so worthwhile to do what I just did.
It would be a shame to have cooked them and think, blast!, it needed another pinch of salt.
I prefer, personally, to have two slightly smaller burgers.
And not too thick.
If they're too thick it takes them too long to cook through, and they get too crusty on the outside, and they might not be properly cooked through.
The less scrappy the edges are the easier they are to cook, and the less likely they are to break.
You can make those up hours ahead of time, in the fridge, for cooking later on.
Here you can see these wonderful ridges, so unique to the grill pan.
Which lends such a beautiful texture and flavour to your meat.
The apple and plum sauce has been cooking away on a gentle heat.
It's that beautiful moment when the apple and the plum has broken down to puree.
You can see the way the plum has stained the apple.
And you can almost tell, even without tasting it, that those two flavours are going to work together.
Give it a quick mix to thoroughly blend the two ingredients together, keep it simmering away, and before long, voila! You have delicious ruby red sauce, which will make a delectable accompaniment to our burgers and chops.
The turnip is a much maligned vegetable, but when simply cooked, it can become something unexpectedly gratifying.
Place some cooked, diced turnip into a food processor, season with a generous helping of salt and pepper, and then blitz.
What you want here is a dropping consistency, just like this.
Pour onto a serving plate, and smooth it out for a better presentation.
And if you want to take this to another level, take some parmesan cheese, and grate the parmesan over the turnip.
Then a drizzle of your best extra virgin olive oil.
And it's a way of making the humble turnip into something as special as any vegetable in the vegetable kingdom.
Now our pork.
I'm now confident that these are cooked.
The crackling on, fennel, coriander.
This is a real celebration of Irish pork, and a meal that I'd be happy to sit down to anywhere, and with anybody.
The final dish in any balanced meal needs to complement whatever has gone before it.
And a raspberry fool would work perfectly with the salad and the pork.
The aim with a fruit fool is to achieve a balance of fruit and cream, that favours both equally, and allows neither element to dominate.
To serve alongside the raspberry fool, I'm going to show you a simple but brilliant recipe for biscuits.
A recipe I keep returning to all of the time.
Three simple ingredients.
Flour, good Irish butter, and caster sugar.
Pop in the butter.
Sometimes I might scrape a few vanilla seeds in here.
I'm not going to today.
Or I might put a pinch of mixed spice, if you want to ring the changes.
And this is a shortbread biscuit.
So there's no liquid in here.
We start off by rubbing the butter into the flour.
My butter's at room temperature.
So it rubs in nice and easily.
The butter is starting to break down.
So I can add in my castor sugar.
At this point you might lose your nerve and think that that's never going to come together without liquid.
It is.
It will.
Just believe it and keep at it.
Gradually it goes from looking like sand, to grit, to pebbles, and then starts to come together.
Bring it into a little slab or ball.
And give it a gentle knead.
All I'm trying to do is make sure everything comes together.
And if I cut that in half, it's like that.
So, I'm ready to roll this.
Generally speaking, with a biscuit mixture that size, I'll roll half of it at a time.
I find it easier to control it.
A little flour on my work surface, not too much.
A little flour on top.
When I'm rolling a biscuit, or pastry, particularly a short crust pastry, what I do is I roll to the edge, but not over the edge.
If you roll over the edge it gets thinner and more difficult to handle.
And I keep moving it.
So it doesn't get a chance to glue itself to the pastry counter.
Baking sheet, and then your cutters of choice.
You don't have to have a cutter, you can cut them freehand if you want.
You see the way I've left a little bit of space between them, 'cause they expand very slightly.
Into the oven, and we're going to cook them until they're golden brown.
Perfect.
These have taken on a lovely golden colour, and they get a little darker at the edges.
It's essential to get these off the tray immediately with a palette knife or egg slice.
I'm going to let them cool on the tray and make the fool.
What I have here are frozen raspberries.
You can make this with fresh raspberries but I actually think that this particular fool recipe is better made with frozen raspberries.
I've added a generous helping of castor sugar to my raspberries.
I'm going to scrape these in here.
And then I'm going to puree.
You need to be careful that you don't do a Jackson Pollack effect all over your work surface.
I think that's pretty much that.
It looks like a thick raspberry sauce at this stage, with the seeds still in.
I'm going to sieve this through a nylon or stainless steel sieve.
Avoid using an aluminium sieve because sometimes the acid in the fruit will react with the aluminium.
Pass it through the sieve, and keep pushing until you get every last bit of the liquid.
Interestingly, whenever you're sieving fruit, the best bit, the most flavoursome, is the bit that comes through the sieve last.
Keep at it.
What I want to end up with in here is just the seeds.
Scrape the seeds and, very importantly, scrape the thick puree.
See the way that's lovely and thick? That's the intensity.
And very simply, all we have to do is add a little bit of whipped cream.
Give the cream a thorough whipping.
You'll know it's ready when it holds stiff peaks.
This is now ready to add to the puree.
You can fold it through completely, or you can leave it so it has a swirly effect.
That's lovely.
Go right down to the bottom to get the liquidy raspberry sauce up through the cream.
Don't overfill.
You can see the streaked effect.
Perch your biscuits on top.
I like to put the tiniest sprinkle of sugar onto the biscuits, just for a little bit of sparkle.
And if you want to, a little mint leaf.
So that's it.
Straight to the table with that.
Simple, easy, three ingredients.
Lovely.